One of the most common sales mantras is “know your customer.” This basic tenet of selling has grown far beyond knowing who enters the store; it requires among other things, knowing what attracts customers, what they look at, how they move around a marketplace, and how long they stay. By studying customer buying habits, retailers have been able to maximize their revenues through tailoring their promotions, offerings, and even store layouts to suit their customers' preferences and habits.
Thus, website providers often wish to collect data that describes usage and visitation patterns for their websites and for individual web pages within the sites. Such information can be extremely valuable in developing usage statistics for various purposes, including for example estimating server load, determining advertising rates, identifying areas of websites that are in need of redesign, and the like.
Often, a user who wishes to analyze website traffic is interested in a particular segment of visits and/or visitors. A segment is defined in one embodiment as the website traffic data that is provided or shown after a filter has been applied to a set of data. In another embodiment, a segment is defined to be a subset of visitors/visits.
Such information is useful in many ways, including for example collecting feedback that leads to improved web page design, determining the effect of various degrees of prominence of links and graphic elements on web pages, and determining the contribution of individual links to an eventual sale.
Users, such as website administrators, often wish to filter and aggregate the results in many different ways. However, existing reporting systems do not allow the user to easily customize and filter results. Thus, much of the business utility of tracking website visitor/customer visitation data is lost using existing systems. Therefore, what is needed is an improved report format that visually depicts web page element usage and valuation statistics.